Well, at least that's what I want to yell. Last year we had such a horrible time with yellow jackets. We didn't get our traps up early enough, so we didn't catch the queens. It was so bad you couldn't even go outside at times. They'd swarm around us, even if we were just trying to get in and out of the car. They bit, too. We weren't the only one having problems though. They were horrible everywhere. All of the stores ran out of traps. We ended up making some out of old 2L pop bottles, which worked amazingly well, but were smelly as hell.
Anyway, we caught two nasty looking ones in our trap yesterday. They're huge—about an inch—so I've been looking to see if maybe we caught a queen or two. I hope so. I guess the key is to catch the queen before the rest get out of control. I took this picture above and it shows the markings pretty well, but I'm not positive it's the queen. What do you think?
It really is hard for me to tell. The picture above looks sort of like this graph of the queen, but my picture below shows the under-belly of the same wasps, which is where I get confused. I guess it doesn't matter too much—just as long as we're trapping them. They're nasty things.
Hmmm, maybe a worker. You're right, it doesn't really look like any of those pictures. I hate yellow jackets, too. When we have the most trouble with them is later in the year when the apples are ripe and on the ground
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